Thursday, December 07, 2006

How Do the British Do It? -- How Do the Masters Perpetrate Psychological Warfare?

The British psychological warfare experts have long been the world's most expert, certainly on a level with the Communists, no slouches themselves. As for the American specialists in this field, they learned much or most of what they know from the British. Consider how close American and British foreign policies have been over the last 200 years, since the War of 1812.

One of the British psy war operatives during World War II was none other than George Orwell, who recounted his experiences at the time in his memoirs [see Orwell: The War Commentaries & George Orwell: The Lost Writings, both edited by WJ West]. Orwell actually describes some of the techniques used in various situations during the war. He describes them in the context of solving various problems posed for the UK psy war effort by developments in the war in view of the constraints of British policy, etc. Previous posts here have described BBC policy towards the Holocaust, which was to ignore it as far as could safely be accomplished without being embarassed or shamed by the lack of coverage when Holocaust-related events became widely known to the public nolens-volens. Hence, when the Holocaust or aspects of it began to be reported outside the Nazi-fascist domain, the BBC began to give stingy bits of information about it, never telling all that the British knew, nor admitting that the British 1939 White Paper policy was preventing Jews from reaching haven in the internationally designated Jewish National Home. This policy doomed hundreds of thousands of Jews to death at Nazi hands, since they had nowhere to go, nowhere to escape to. The British government, shamelessly hypocritically as usual, did not admit then nor have they ever admitted that the UK was a silent partner in the Holocaust.

I watched an example of British propaganda expertise last night, Saturday 11-22-2006. Bear in mind that the most effective propaganda is usually a blend of fact and fiction. Hence, the American psy warrior Noam Chomsky may say some true things in addition to the lies, all skilfully blended together so that the moderately informed consumer of propaganda is not aware of where fact ends and lies begin. This can be done by simply juxtaposing what a reasonably intelligent and informed person may know or believe to be true with a lie. Hence, the first sentence of one of Chomsky's efforts at deception may be fully true, or at least appear very reasonable and plausible, that is, it may have a great deal of verisimilitude. The second sentence can be a total lie, which may yet also be plausible to the informed, intelligent reader. In any event, the truth or verisimilitude of the first sentence carries over in the reader's mind into the second sentence, unless the reader is very well informed about a particular subject, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict and Western support for the Arabs over the years. That is, what is true or seems to be true extends its verisimilitude to the false.

Likewise, the basic principle explained here applies to most of what Edward Said said in Orientalism and other books. Said --a well-paid professor at Columbia, a prestigious Ivy League university-- was another American psy warrior, albeit wearing the cloak of an Arab nationalist, or oppressed "palestinian." Said was right to point out that anthropologists and other sorts of social scientists --as well as historians, archeologists, philologists, comparative religion specialists, etc-- can produce work useful to imperialists, and may even be agents of governments. Nor was Said the first one to point this out. However, what may be useful to a government's policy is not necessarily false. Indeed, it may very well be true. Don't governments want to know the truth, at least for their own purposes?

Said avoided admitting that various Western imperialist powers indeed were pro-Arab in policy in regard to Zionism, since they hated Jews much more than they hated Arabs, if at all. Imperial Germany, Austro-Hungary [the Habsburg Empire], Britain, and France, all had pro-Arab and/or pro-Muslim policies at various times during the 19th century. After World War I, the United States and Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and Britain and France all had pro-Arab, pro-Islamic policies at various times or consistently. Likewise, various Western writers and scholars living in and/or writing about the Arab and Muslim worlds were often sympathetic to Arabs and Muslims. One thinks of Sir Richard Burton and TE Lawrence.

Last night [11-22-06], Israel's First Channel relayed a feature report from a British TV station which demonstrated the use of psy war principles. Andrew Gilmore went to southern Lebanon and discovered that Israel --according to him and to "human rights" groups-- had been using cluster bombs. Gilmore at one point said that such weapons were illegal under international law; at another point he said that they were not illegal but were forbidden to be used in populated areas. He went on about these weapons over and over, interviewing families in Shi`ite villages, showing destroyed houses, a wounded child, etc. Yet he did not say that the Hizbullah and its sponsors, Syria and Iran, regularly made Judeophobic, Nazi-like propaganda, such as: "The Jewish microbe is everywhere", which I read in LeFigaro in about 1987, in a quote from a Hizbullah newspaper. No mention, likewise, of the hate-generating official Syrian position that Damascene Jews in 1840 had killed a monk in order to use his blood for baking matsot. This position has been expounded in several books by former Syrian "defense" minister, Mustafa Tlas. Likewise, the Hizbullah TV station, al-Manar, produced a TV film for viewing by Muslim families during Ramadan that supplies essentially the same message. For this reason, French Jews were able to prevail on the French TV and radio supervision body [le Haut Conseil de l'Audio-Visuel, the French counterpart of the American FCC] to ban al-Manar from satellite broadcasts under French control.

Now Gilmore spoke of the danger to children --especially-- with films of children in Shi`ite villages and scenic backdrops of pastoral landscape. He did briefly mention that "Human Rights Watch" had found that Hizbullah had shot cluster bombs into Israel, but --he claimed-- they were merely a "guerrilla group," omitting the Hizbullah's ties to Syria and Iran that threaten to destroy Israel, implicitly brandishing Iran's planned nuclear bomb. Nor did he point out that the Hizbullah's cluster bombs and rockets of various kinds shot into Israel were a danger for children and other civilians. In fact, many civilians --including children-- were killed in Israel. This was not mentioned. He did allude to Hizbullah placement of rocket launchers in and near civilian locations, by asking the family that he interviewed about this and admitting that they were evasive on the matter. What he did not report was how deeply the Hizbullah was involved with the lives of the Shi`ite villagers in south Lebanon, how deeply these people had been indoctrinated to hate Jews, how bunkers for weapons storage, concealment of terrorists, and combat had been built in and around population centers. Geneva Convention IV states that the presence of non-combatants ["protected persons"] does NOT exclude a location from military attack if there are also military targets in that location. Gilmore did not ask the family about their ties to Hizbullah, the possible use of their home for Hizbullah weapons storage or terrorist concealment. Nor did he point out the Hizb's sponsorship and supply from Nazi-like Syria and Iran.

None of that from psy warrior Gilmore. Just repetition of how the Israelis were ostensibly child killers, slaughterers of civilians, violators of international law, etc. Note that Gilmore very briefly alluded to an HRW report that Hizbullah had used cluster bombs against Israel [indeed, some of these bombs fell in an Israeli Arab village] and suggested that his hosts were being evasive about the presence of Hizbullah rocket launchers near their village. Here Gilmore was pretending to be fair and balanced, briefly to be sure. Also note his excuse for Hizbullah. They are "only a guerrilla group," he said, omitting reference to Syria and Iran, while thereby evoking the argument of "disproportionate" Israeli response, so often used by the Euro-hypocrites against Israel, that is, against the old target of their hatred, the Jews. Following his logic, Israel should have used no more cluster bombs than the Hizbullah had used, and Israel should have allowed Hizbullah to kill as many Israelis as Israel had killed Hizbullah operatives and/or civilians. But that is not how Britain or the USA fight their wars. These two Allied powers had killed, by the end of World War II, many more German civilians than British and Americans had been killed by the Germans. The British air force chief, nicknamed Bomber Harris, oversaw the destruction of the German city of Dresden by aerial bombing, not to mention the many tens of thousands killed in Hamburg by Allied bombings. Were the British and Americans being "disproportionate"? In fact, Nazi Germany was a mass murderous state. Further, tens of millions of people, soldiers and civilians, were killed by Germany on the Eastern Front. However, the numbers of civilians killed in London and elsewhere in the UK, were proportionally much lower than the number of Germans that they killed. Indeed, during and after WW2, Nazi propaganda and "pacifist" propaganda accused the Allies of war crimes in Dresden. But Gilmore mentioned nothing of his own country's "disproportionate" response to Nazi aggression. To look at the "disproportionate response" argument another way, should the police force in a civilized country respond to armed criminals in a proportionate way, should it negotiate with criminal gangs to ensure them their own turf protected by a cease fire? Should the police be armed with weapons no more potent than those of the criminals? Were the Americans and British proportionate in their responses in Iraq and Afghanistan? How about the British in the Falkland Islands/Islas Malvinas War of 1982? Of course, the European "disproportionate response" argument is ridiculous, but many of the British public --especially-- are taken in by it. That also includes a good portion of British academia, which has clearly Nazi leanings without realizing it, perhaps.

Other psy war themes used by British broadcast propaganda are:1) the notion of a distinct "palestinian people" which nobody had ever heard of before Israel's War of Independence, whereas Arab expert witnesses testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine [1946] had denied that there was such a place as "palestine" in history. This false "palestinian people" notion has been of immense aid to creating worldwide sympathy for Arab genocidal aims against Israel;2) that the Jews are super-white "Europeans" intruding in the "non-white" Middle East. Actually, this theme, especially prominent in the 1960s, in order to take advantage of the Black civil rights movement in the United States, utilized insinuation rather than explicit assertion. For instance, various political factions and communications outlets would say that Israel had found refuge for Jews in a country inhabited by "non-white" people. However, the Jews were not explicitly described as "white" or "super-white" or "Nordic," since an explicit statement would be more likely to be easily refuted. Rather, the description of the Jews as "white" or "whiter than white" was insinuated from the description of the Arabs as "non-White." In fact, there is a wide range of skin color among both Jews and Arabs. This includes my own family, my mother's very dark father, some of my cousins on both sides, etc. Nevertheless, the propaganda succeeded in portraying Jews as alien to the Middle East, flying in the face of all known and previously accepted history.

In view of the skillful agit-prop of Andrew Gilmore and other psy warriors, it is no wonder that the extent of Israelophobia and Judeophobia in Britain is probably higher than anywhere else in Europe. According to my information, the extent of these hatreds is greater in the UK than in other major European states, such as France and Italy, and maybe worse even than in Germany.- - - - - - -Coming: Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron, follies of peacemaking, lies from the pens of Carter, Baker, & Co., etc.

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The world swims in lies. Who doesn't know that? Even the dupes are told there are lies about. We aim to dispel the fog of lies, especially about Israel, like our prophets of old and our poets like Yehudah haLevi.
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How shall I render my vows and my bonds, While yet
Zion lieth beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?
The false prophets cry Peace, and there is no peace.
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צלום דבורה בת יהודה לייב ז''ל
Dvoyreh bas Yehudah Leyb, Eliyahu's mother. My own photo will have to await more peaceful times.
I have been an observer of
the human comedy, and the human tragedy for many years.